WIDE SARGASSO SEA AUDIOBOOK FREE SERIES

Where BrontГ«'s gothic is cold and dark, Rhys's sweats and swelters. There is nothing idyllic about life on this island, and Dominican-born Rhys is brilliant at evoking the swarming oppressiveness of relentless sunshine. When she is a child, the family mansion is torched and a girl whom she wants to be her friend throws a rock at her head вЂ“ incidents that resound with distorted echoes of Jane Eyre. How had I never noticed this before? Could it be that the poor little orphan of my memory was harbouring vengeful fantasies? Had I all along been mistaking a gothic character for a Dickensian one? It's with assumptions such as this that Jean Rhys plays in her fabulously atmospheric exploration of the life of the first Mrs Rochester.ДЄntoinette Conway is an orphan, too, as a Creole heiress marooned in Jamaica, in the ruins of a slaving culture that has made her a pariah to her black neighbours. I got out my old copy of Jane Eyre, and there was the evidence: 'The fiend pinning down the thief's pack behind him' 'the black horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows.'

WIDE SARGASSO SEA AUDIOBOOK FREE SERIES

I'd always assumed that Jane was escaping into beautiful avian images, but it turns out that a far more gothic imagination is hidden between the chapters, in a series of sinister miniature engravings. It began a couple of years ago with Jenny Uglow's wonderful biography of the 18th-century engraver Thomas Bewick, whose History of British Birds is the book with which the 10-year-old Jane Eyre diverts herself behind the curtains at Gateshead Hall, until it is hurled at her head by her odious cousin. It was just such a loop that brought me back to Wide Sargasso Sea, one of the great prequels of world literature. For someone who, like me, spends their working life reading in straight lines вЂ“ what's new, is it any good? вЂ“ holidays offer the luxury of reading in circles.

Where would summer be without a series of reading blogs? This year's subject, 'a book for the beach', might seem limiting, but there are as many sorts of beach holiday as there are books to enjoy on them.

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